Maybe beware of microservices

jrochkind

1 year ago

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In a comment on my long, um, diatribe last year about linked data, Eric Hellman suggested “I fear the library world has no way to create a shared technology roadmap that can steer it away from dead ends that at one time were the new shiny,” and I responded “I think there’s something to what you suggest at the end, the slow-moving speed of the library community with regard to technology may mean we’re stuck responding with what seemed to be exciting future trends…. 10+ years ago, regardless of how they’ve worked out since. Perhaps if that slow speed were taken into account, it would mean we should stick to well established mature technologies, not “new shiny” things which we lack the agility to respond to appropriately.”

I was reminded of this recently when running across a blog post about “Microservices”, which I also think were very hyped 5-10 years ago, but lately are approached with a lot more caution in the general software engineering industry, as a result of hard-earned lessons from practice.

Sean Kelly, in Microservices? Please, Don’t does write about some of the potential advantages of microservces, but as you’d expect from the title, mainfully focuses on pitfalls engineers have learned through working with microservice architectures. He warns:

When Should You Use Microservices?

“When you’re ready as an engineering organization.”

I’d like to close by going over when it could be the right time to pivot to this approach (or, if you’re starting out, how to know if this is the right way to start).

The single most important step on the path to a solid, workable approach to microservices is simply understanding the domain you’re working in. If you can’t understand it, or if you’re still trying to figure it out, microservices could do more harm than good. However, if you have a deep understanding, then you know where the boundaries are and what the dependencies are, so a microservices approach could be the right move.

Another important thing to have a handle on is your workflows – specifically, how they might relate to the idea of a distributed transaction. If you know the paths each category of request will make through your system and you understand where, how, and why each of those paths might fail, then you could start to build out a distributed model of handling your requests.

Alongside understanding your workflows is monitoring your workflows. Monitoring is a subject greater than just “Microservice VS Monolith,” but it should be something at the core of your engineering efforts. You may need a lot of data at your fingertips about various parts of your systems to understand why one of them is underperforming, or even throwing errors. If you have a solid approach for monitoring the various pieces of your system, you can begin to understand your systems behaviors as you increase its footprint horizontally.

Finally, when you can actually demonstrate value to your engineering organization and the business, then moving to microservices will help you grow, scale, and make money. Although it’s fun to build things and try new ideas out, at the end of the day the most important thing for many companies is their bottom line. If you have to delay putting out a new feature that will make the company revenue because a blog post told you monoliths were “doing it wrong,” you’re going to need to justify that to the business. Sometimes these tradeoffs are worth it. Sometimes they aren’t. Knowing how to pick your battles and spend time on the right technical debt will earn you a lot of credit in the long run.

Now, I think many library and library industry development teams actually are pretty okay at understanding the domain and workflows. With the important caveat that ours tend to end up so complex (needlessly or not), that they can be very difficult to understand, and often change — which is a pretty big caveat, for Kelly’s warning.

But monitoring? In library/library industry projects? Years (maybe literally a decade) behind the software industry at large. Which I think is actually just a pointer to a general lack of engineering capabilities (whether skill or resource based) in libraries (especially) and the library industry (including vendors, to some extent).

Microservices are a complicated architecture. They are something to do not only when there’s a clear benefit you’re going to get from them, but when you have an engineering organization that has the engineering experience, skill, resources, and coordination to pull off sophisticated software engineering feats.

How many library engineering organizations do you think meet that? How many library engineering organizations can even be called ‘engineering organizations’?

Beware, when people are telling you microservices are the new thing or “the answer”. In the industry at large, people and organizations have been burned by biting off more than they can chew in a microservice-based architecture, even starting with more sophisticated engineering organizations than most libraries or many library sector vendors have.